I had a strict rule when our son was born last summer: I wouldn't post any photos of him in public settings.

It made sense to me at the time. I live a pretty public life, and the decision to keep him off my Twitter feed and this space felt like asserting that I had a right to privacy. Really, I'd already been in the digital media game for so long that I needed to give permission to myself not to share. Living an intellectual life online, sharing becomes the default. Do thing, share thing.

But everything about my wife's pregnancy and then the birth of our child did not feel like a part of the digital realm. No experience has ever grounded me more in the physical fact of our existence than watching the kid grow from a finger of a fetus into the baby that emerged in August, and then onward as he's grown up and looked out.

He has to learn every single physical thing. The thought that circles my brain as I watch him squat and stand and clap and wave is that there are so many ways to not walk and yet almost all kids converge on the same locomotive solution eventually. It's such a fascinating lesson in humanness, all these people walking and no one thinking anything about the fact that we're all doing it the same way. It's not exactly that we're all born the same, but rather, given the basic constraints of the human form and the dictates of physical reality and the modern world, we all must figure out how to walk, and we do.

So, hurrah for physicality, for bodies in space. That's been one lesson of this first year.

Hurrah for closed social networks, too. The grandparents get the full, raw feed. And for friends, I feel comfortable (or a reasonable facsimile of comfortable) sharing on Instagram because I know every single person who follows me there. And it's 400 people instead of thousands: more than Dunbar's number, but easy enough to imagine as a global village.

Everything's good, then. Baby O suddenly has toddler written all over him. He's healthy and he has very sparkly eyes that he flashes at grandmas in the street until they come over and start blowing him kisses and cooing. He loves dogs. A lot. Especially golden retrievers. And some days, all it takes to make him happy is to let him parade through the streets of Oakland holding not one but two pinwheels, spinning gently in the breeze. One time he even slept through the night. And we have a great record of this adventure of coming to know our child, shared with only a select group of people, people we know care about him.

And yet. Some part of me feels like I really want to share him—or his digital representation, at least—with the broader world.

For one, he is so damn cute. You should see the little curls he's developed behind his ears... [parental fawning] ...

I spared you that paragraph. But he really is. But also, over the years—and it is many years now, on Twitter—I've built a kind of connection that's hard to define. It's a long-term loose tie. I know thousands of people by their work or a few nice exchanges we had one time about food carts or geology or tensile strength or water heaters or HTML. And I've learned so much from these people, been pointed to so many interesting resources, peeked in on so many different lives and minds.

It's not as Dave Eggers would have it in his book The Circle that "Not sharing is stealing." It's not exactly Fear of Missing Out. It's something more subtle: the dawning realization not that my relationships with these invisible figures don't exist or aren't important, but that they do and are. It's not a particular person, but all the people put together, the melange, who can deliver thoughts from outside the temporal, geographic, demographic, and work bubbles in which I exist.

When I used to see parents post photographs of their babies on Twitter, I'd cringe, imagining the facial recognition algorithms as laser beams scanning their child's still unformed features. Now, I'm like, "Awwwww"—not just because all kids are now cute to me and this is a legally required reaction—but because I'm jealous that they feel comfortable popping the kid out there.

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It's almost the same feeling I get when two kids are doing something in a park that may or may not be very mildly dangerous. Do you want to be the twitchy, hovery parent who is narrating possible disaster—"Watch out honey! Hey, that can tip! Don't touch that! It's heavy!"—or do you want to be the parent who is clearly optimizing for risk-tolerance, sitting there on the grass, cool and French-like, watchful but with a wide behavioral envelope.

I'd like to imagine I'm closer to the latter, but I am almost certainly near the caricature of the former. And so it goes with baby photos. Whatever minor risk it represents to post pictures of O on Twitter wins out over my desire to tap the network's edges.

Recently, I've gotten up close to the line. I post observations about him. Or I have even posted a photo or two, but cropped so as to leave out his face. And that feels like enough for now. But who knows if that'll change. If there's anything I've learned in 10 months of fatherhood, it's that the principles I held so dearly before I was a dad require new kinds of flexibility. Pragmatism is the rule.

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

President Obama has asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking, a top advisor told reporters Friday. The White House will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before Obama leaves office on January 20, 2017, she said.

Lisa Monaco, the president’s advisor for homeland security, made the comments at a Christian Science Monitor event. They were first reported by Politico and The Hill.

Last week, every Democrat (and a Democrat-aligned Independent) on the Senate Intelligence Committee called on the White House to declassify and release more information about Russia’s involvement in the U.S. elections. It’s not clear whether the review announced Friday is connected to the letter from the committee members.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

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In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

The president-elect has chosen Andrew Puzder, a vocal critic of minimum-wage hikes and new overtime rules.

Updated on December 9, 2016

President-Elect Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he picked Andrew Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which owns fast-food chains Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, to lead the U.S. Department of Labor. Puzder—like several of Trump’s other nominees—is a multi-millionaire and Washington outsider who served as an adviser and fundraiser during the presidential campaign. While there’s no political record to indicate how Puzder thinks about the labor market, his remarks as a business executive give some indication of the stances he’ll take on several important labor issues.

If confirmed, Puzder will likely take a pro-business, anti-labor, approach to steering the federal agency tasked with protecting American workers and their jobs, which clashes with Trump’s populist campaign message of fighting for blue-collar workers. Puzder has been a vocal defender of Trump’s economic policies, including lowering the corporate-tax rate, and has opposed Obamacare and certain business regulations, such as a higher minimum wage. Puzder has argued against raising the minimum wage and offering paid leave and health insurance to employees. Efforts to increase the minimum wage, he writes, will hurt everyone, especially low-skilled workers, because “businesses will have to figure out the best way to deal with the high labor costs.” Those changes, he says, will lead to price increases, more efficient labor management, and automation.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”